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  • La Próxima Parada Is Next
  • Dagoberto Gilb, Associate Editor (bio)

My great aunt, my mother told me, had traveled from Mexico City to the US in the 1920s as a world famous opera star. This sister of my grandmother (she died prematurely in my mother's late teens) had performed in Europe, New York, and finally came to live in Los Angeles, where she was briefly married to a Hollywood director. She became a kind of surrogate mother to my mother, who told me it was through my great aunt that she'd learned what were the proper, mannered ways of the world. By the time I became conscious of my great aunt, domestic trouble had overtaken my mother's own life—the only life of hers I knew. I have only a baby's memory reel of my father saying goodbye as he got what were probably his last things. What family she had—her brothers, my uncles—were absent because of money she "borrowed" and who knew what else. My mother was gone too much, dated plenty, and liked to dress plush and drink from cocktail glasses. She was unreliable in action and story. When I was old enough to work, it was for my father, who was the floor superintendent at a downtown industrial laundry—the plant my mother grew up beside. The Anglo boss of at least two hundred workers, three-fourths of them mexicanos, my father had grown up in East LA, where he'd learned Spanish. He was a gruff, hard man, a World War II Marine who worked twelve hours a day, six days a week, who would keep this job for 49 years, starting as a thirteen year old. I learned my great aunt had occasionally worked for him, too, as a seamstress. She sewed the elastic on bra straps, he told me. I wanted to know if he knew about her fame before. I never asked him much, and he offered few words. She was, he said with finality, just a Mexican.

My father's outlook was undoubtedly tinged with bitterness about being dumped, a divorce, and his job did demand him to be above, superior, to people who worked for him. If it were only him, it would be only something for me. But I verified the truth of my great aunt's history years later—the basis of a short story I wrote, "The Magic of Blood," which became a book title of a collection—and what I did was what I have learned we all do with the Mexican in us: We want to overpower the dismissive less than given as our being.

It is a structure that remains—yes, of course it's classic sociology of the poor and the rich. But there is more here. For me it's become like a knotted math equation that is essential for a PhD in physics: we are continuously perceived through some not-actual space, not-now time warp, even as the Mexican culture has played so essentially in the history of the American West, so dramatically in the story of this country.

Dramatically? We all know about the Academy Awards. We visualize easily the beautiful golden statue—it's much more well known than the logo for National Basketball Association, though most of us who watch pro games also are aware that it is the silhouette of West Virginia's NBA star, Jerry West. Yet does anyone realize that the Oscar is the body of Mexican cinema's legendary director Emilio "El Indio" Fernández who posed nude for it? This is but a metaphor for what is writ large across the historical landscape that is California and the Southwest and Texas—the names of the mountains, canyons, and rivers, the architectural style that has been most desirable in the past as it is now, and that even became its mass-produced, stuccoed version tract house in the West. The vaquero became a cowboy. A rainbow of colors, de rigueur decor even for Arizona Republicans. The salsa, tacos, and burritos that have become as unethnically American as pizza, hot dogs, and hamburgers—or almost, because those first...

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